Quit Your Worrying! eBook

of iron, a wild sort of whimsical humor rose in
her from the ferment of utter fatigue and anxiety.
When Paul came in, looking very grave, she told
him with a wavering laugh, ’If I tried as hard
for ten minutes to go to Heaven as I’ve tried
all day to have this dinner right, I’d certainly
have a front seat in the angel choir. If
anybody here to-night is not satisfied, it’ll
be because he’s harder to please than St.
Peter himself.’

During the evening:

Lydia seemed to herself to be in an
endless bad dream. The exhausting efforts
of the day had reduced her to a sort of coma of
fatigue through which she felt but dully the successive
stabs of the ill-served unsuccessful dinner. At
times, the table, the guests, the room itself,
wavered before her, and she clutched at her chair
to keep her balance. She did not know that
she was laughing and talking gaily and eating
nothing. She was only conscious of an intense
longing for the end of things, and darkness and
quiet.

When it was all over and her husband was compelled
to recognize that it had been a failure, his mental
attitude is thus expressed:

He had determined to preserve at all
costs the appearance of the indulgent, non-critical,
over-patient husband that he intensely felt himself
to be. No force, he thought grimly, shutting
his jaws hard, should drag from him a word of his
real sentiments. Fanned by the wind of this virtuous
resolution, his sentiments grew hotter and hotter
as he walked about, locking doors and windows,
and reviewing bitterly the events of the evening.
If he was to restrain himself from saying, he
would at least allow himself the privilege of feeling
all that was possible to a man deeply injured.

And that night Lydia felt for the “first time
the quickening to life of her child. And during
all that day, until then, she had forgotten that she
was to know motherhood.” Can words more
forcefully depict the worry of the squirrel-cage
than this—­that an unnecessary dinner, given
in unnecessary style, at unnecessary expense, to visitors
to whom it was unnecessary should have driven from
her thought, and doubtless seriously injured, the
new life that she was so soon to give to the world?

Oh, men and women of divine descent and divine heritage,
quit your squirrel-cage stage of existence. Is
life to be one mere whirling around of the cage of
useless toil or pleasure, of mere imagining that you
are doing something? Work with an object.
Know your object, that it is worthy the highest endeavor
of a human being, and then pursue it with a divine
enthusiasm that no obstacle can daunt, an ardor that
no weariness can quench. Then it is you will
begin to live. There is no life in worry.
Worry is a waste of life. If you are a worrier,
that is a proof you (in so far as you worry) do not
appreciate the value of your own life, for a worthy
object, a divine enthusiasm, a noble ardor are in